Welcome To Our Sunroom

Hi friends!   Welcome to our sunroom!    I'm very excited to share our very first "finished" room in our home here at Harmony Hills.  Go ahead and grab a cuppa and settle in for some serious photo oohs and ahhs, because I have lots and lots of images to share even in this relatively small room!

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Our sunroom is located on the far right side of our house, which is the south side, and it has three walls full of windows.  It's awesome, because the southern exposure means that the light is ALWAYS beautiful in this room!   In the winter it's sunny and bright and cheery, and in the summer, the trees on the south hill give lots of shade to keep the room cool even in the hot sun.   Perfect!

If you visited my series of articles showing our house on move-in day, you may recall this room as it looked when it was empty:

When we moved in, we had pre-ordered the new rug and it actually arrived to the house before we closed!  So the previous owners were nice enough to lay it out for us before we moved in.

During the time when we knew we were buying the house, but we hadn't yet completed the purchase, I was doing a lot of planning and dreaming.  This room caught my imagination right away, and I ended up planning and pre-purchasing a lot of what ended up being here.

I was thrilled to find the paint colors in the room that were perfect for the vibe I was going for.  It's a very serene mineral green/blue color (sorry, don't know exact color) and the trim is a warm white.   These colors became the perfect backdrop for the room I had in my head - yay!

I had some pieces that I knew would go here; I had some thoughts on pieces to buy; and a few pieces ended up in there that I hadn't counted on.  I gathered ideas in a dedicated Pinterest board, and I even created a design board for the room.  Some of the ideas in the board didn't get implemented, but it was really helpful as a tool to get the design juices flowing.

In the end, on move-in day we were able to set up this room immediately, and it was the first room that was "done", and I spent a LOT of time in this room relaxing while the rest of the house stayed in a chaotic state from unpacking and such.

Without further ado, here is the room as it is today.  There are two entrances to the room, with the main entrance being these pretty double french doors with transom that lead from the living room.  All the interior doors and all the windows in the house are original, from 1925.  

There are eleven double-hung wooden windows in the sunroom, all of them 9-over-9 (that's the number of smaller panes of glass on top and bottom).   All of them have the original wood mullions and original glass panes.   

On the front wall of the house, there is a long and low radiator for winter heat.   I placed this console table here because it has lots of air circulation around the bottom of it to keep the heat flowing.  

The room is long and narrow - about 10' deep and about 18' long, with windows on three sides.   

On the fourth wall (adjoining the living room) there is a 6' wide bump out for the living room chimney stack.  It was the best spot to put our sofa.   On the far end of the room was a great place to put a small table for dining.

Wouldn't you know, as soon as I decided to spend any amount of time this room the pups came in to join me.   The brown bench used to be a piano bench with double duty at the kitchen table when the leaf is put in, but now the bench is the supreme domain of the queens of the household, Hannah and Lulu.   

The sofa is the Pottery Barn PB Basics sofa, with the down cushion option.    I purchased this sofa when we lived in Raleigh (right before moving to Harmony Hills in Baltimore last year), and I LOVE IT!   When we moved here, it became obvious to me that its casual and relaxed styling was perfect for the sunroom.  So this is where it went on day 1.

I have a rotating collection of pillows for this room.  Currently we're using this blue and green and taupe bird print pillow to draw these colors together in the room, and this creamy plush velvet pillow to warm up the stark white sofa cover just a little.    The pillows and the throw all came from HomeGoods at various times over the last two or three years.  

The artwork that is hanging over the sofa was also purchased for our home in Raleigh.    I ordered it online from art.com.   I love its contemporary-yet-realistic-yet-modern-impressionistic version of woods.   I love the colors in it - dark to light green, chartreuse, yellow, blue, spa blue, warm and dark brown.    I was happy to put it here in the sunroom.

On the far side of the sofa there is another radiator.   It was an awkward space to furnish, and I ended up compromising and putting my baker's rack here.    The black iron metal and the warm wood top and wicker baskets add some warmth to the color scheme in here, but it seems to be a bit darker than the rest of the room calls for.  I'm thinking of painting the metal and/or the wood a lighter color... what do you think?   

I love this little glass-top iron table and chair set over here.   This is a piece that I purposely purchased for this room, after we knew we were moving here but before we moved in.  I found it at an antiques mall in Raleigh, and knew it was just perfect for this room!  

  

I don't know quite how old it is.  It's smallish - only about 3' square.   It might have been used on a patio years ago before outdoor furniture got so big.    Here in the sunroom, we eat here on hot summer evenings when the kitchen is too hot.   I love having girlfriends over for lunch or dinner here, too.  

So I need some advice about the black console, the brown bench, and the metal/wood baker's rack.   They're the only dark elements in the room.   Should I paint them (or slipcover in the bench's case)?   or should I leave them so that the room has some weight and anchor to it?   I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Oh!  I should tell you that in the winter, the sofa cover comes off and I put a chocolate brown velvet sofa cover on... if that changes your opinion.  

  

When I was planning this room, I wasn't sure what to do about a coffee table and end tables.   I knew whatever I chose had to be functional and multi-purpose.  Relaxing is the most important function of this room, so I chose to go with storage ottomans instead of a coffee table.  That was a perfect choice!   We often come in here and relax with our feet up.  These particular ottomans came from Wild Orchid Quilts, but when I ordered them I saw them at Joss & Main as well as a few other online retailers.   I ended up not choosing an end table here, since it would stick out in front of the french door entrance.  So I put a wicker basket that came from Pier 1 more than 10 years ago, and we use that instead.  They don't seem to carry this exact basket anymore, but I found a couple similar ones here and here. 

The rug is a purchase from Joss & Main, as I said, before we moved in.  I'm having trouble finding it on J&M right now, but I did find it on Amazon here.

It has a thin pile (about 1/4"), and has an "already worn" vintage feel to it.  I was thinking that if a family had lived here for a very long time, they might buy a new rug for their main living room, and move their old rug into the sunroom... so that's the vibe I was going for design-wise.   

I have a definite bird theme going on in here, from bird nests to bird houses to bird prints, etc.   This is partly because I love nature and love to watch birds in the garden, but mostly because my maiden name is "Bird".  :-)

Photos in the room were difficult because of all of the backlighting from the beautiful windows... so please forgive the overexposure.

You might have noticed the grapevine and icicle lights around the ceiling...  LOL!  That's a leftover from Christmas time last year.   The grapevines actually were pulled out of the trees on our south hill - you woudln't believe the overgrowth of grapevine we had there!   I cut them down and laid them on the ground for a few weeks.  Then I tied them together into garlands, and decorated them with plastic beads and silver glitter to make natural Christmas decor for the sunroom.   I added LED icicle lights for a festive glow.   

But then when it came time to put the holiday decorations away, I couldn't bring myself to take them down.  Partly because it was still the dead of winter and we needed all the light we could get in the evenings.  And partly because the glitter and beads would fall off and go EVERYWHERE if I took them down.  So I left them up.  

We actually don't turn the lights on all that often - like, almost never - but I do like the option of having them there, and I do like the natural garland around the ceiling.    Now that I look at the pictures, I realize maybe they should come down?   I don't know.  I figure if it makes you happy, you should do it even if it goes against "proper" design rules, right???

So the photos up until now have been exposed to show the true colors of the interior walls and paint colors and furniture colors, but doing that made it impossible to see the gorgeous views out the window.  So now I'll share some views of the room that show the outside views.

Sit down on the sofa and look around the room, and enjoy the peaceful tree canopy in the warm sunlight.

Thanks so much for joining me on this tour of our Sunroom.   Hannah and Lulu would say "Thank You" as well, if they could only move from their comfy napping spot.  :-)

I hope you'll say hello in the comments, and let me know what you think about possibly painting the console and baker's rack.

Want to see more of Harmony Hills?    Take a tour of our house as it looked on move-in day.

One of the first projects I did in the house was to organize and beautify the laundry room.  Check out how I did that in this post.

Be sure to follow me on Facebook and Pinterest to get more tips and information about decorating in your home and garden. 

  

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Source List for some of the items you see in this post (some are affiliate links)

Pottery Barn PB Basics Sofa

Storage Ottoman

Console Table

Chocolate Brown Velvet Tufted Bench

Safavieh Rug

Baker's Rack

Lidded basket (similar, similar)

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Linking to:

Metamorphosis Monday - Between Naps on the Porch
The Scoop - StoneGable
Make it Pretty Monday - The Dedicated House
Wow Us Wednesday - Savvy Southern Style
Home and Garden Thursday - A Delightsome Life



I'm honored to have had this post featured at A Delightsome Life:

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